“90% of CEOs believe the digital economy will impact their industry, but less than 15% are executing on a digital strategy.”
Digital transformation continues to be the conversation on everyone’s minds. At the most recent CIO Strategy Meeting in Los Angeles, Joyce Swanke, Senior Director of Customer Innovation and Enterprise Platform at SAP, gave the keynote presentation on changing digital mindsets, putting data management at the forefront, and adjusting business models as a result.
Here’s what she had to say in a brief one-on-one:
How do you define digital transformation? How has that definition changed?
I think the biggest change is that companies used to look at digital transformation as enabling mobile technology, and now we’re moving to data as the asset of the company, and learning how we can leverage that new data to get insights and create totally new business models.
As far as the transformations that we’re seeing, of course mobile is still a big part of that strategy because once you develop something new, you’ve got to deploy it to your end users. People used to think that digital was connecting people with cell phone apps, and now it’s become a lot bigger than that because of the ability to consume big data and do things with it.
What’s influencing the relationship between organizations and their customers’ digital journeys lately?
Like I said, companies are realizing that they have all this data, it’s an asset, and we’re not doing anything with it. I work with a lot of manufacturing companies and, on average, they only use about 1% of the data that’s streaming from their manufacturing operations. The big change across the board is looking for what to do with that data, how to gain new insights, and how to take those real-time actions and make a difference across the organization and in those customer relationships.
In your opinion, what has been the most profound, technological impact on the business world to date?
It’s really those capabilities to consume and gain insights from big data. In the past, you couldn’t manually take in all this information and figure things out, it would just take forever. Those capabilities to leverage data from all different sources and gain totally new insights is remarkable.
***
Thanks so much to Joyce Swanke for her insights on the big data impact on digital transformation! Click here to download and read through her full presentation from the January 2017 CIO Strategy Meeting in LA.